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Sunday, September 22, 1912: Went to S.S. this afternoon and attended Catechize.

Recent photo of the site where the McEwensville Baptist Church once stood.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

When I read this diary entry, I got stuck on a simple vocabulary question. I remember going to “catechism” class when I was in middle school. How does “catechize” differ from “catechism”? Is it a different part of speech?

The Free Online Dictionary defines catechize as “to teach the principles of Christian dogma, discipline, and ethics by means of questions and answers.”

While catechism is “a book giving a brief summary of the basic principles of Christianity in question-and-answer form.”

Grandma was 17-years-old when she wrote this entry. I’m surprised that she hadn’t completed catechize and joined the church when she was in her early teens.

14 Responses

Catechize is a term that is not used very much today. However, I believe that even if your Grandma had already joined the church she would still be learning more about being a Christian. I think that this is where there is a difference between the two terms. Catechize is simply a methodology of learning, where as a catechism is a defined set of information in the question and answer form.

Interesting. I didn’t know that Baptists had any form of catechism. Being Lutheran, I took catechism in about 7th/8th grade, so it seems that your grandmother is taking the instruction a bit late. However, the Baptists I grew up around (my grandparents) didn’t believe in infant baptism, so perhaps such training would wait for a few years after being baptized.

Hello

I look forward to sharing my grandmother's diary with relatives and friends. Helena Muffly (Swartz) kept a diary from 1911-1914. She was 15 years old when she began this diary. I plan to post these entries one day at a time—exactly 100 years after she wrote them. I hope you enjoy this glimpse back to a slower paced time.

The header is a picture of the farm where my grandmother lived when she wrote this diary. It is located in Northumberland County in central Pennsyvlania about a mile outside of McEwenvsille. My father said that the buildings look similar to what they looked like when he was a child.